The ecclesiastic and the man

"The man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the victory fell to the man."
-Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

Teaching Tess in the current world climate increasingly brings me back to this quote.  We are still, as a world, torn between the rigidity of ecclesiastical thinking that Hardy despised and the human.  In the face of desparate need for empathetic connection, fundamentalism of all types (not simply religious) continues to violate and block that need. 

Hardy stopped writing novels because of their critical rejection.  How can we preserve a victory for the human within us in the face of the ecclesiastic?